Twitter’s Increased Character Count: What We Know

In the face of stalling user growth, there has been a flurry of activity at Twitter to stimulate the slump it’s experiencing in capturing new users. The most recent result of this activity is Twitter’s ‘Moments’ product.

In recent months however, there has been speculation of Twitter changing one of its most fundamental features – the 140-character limit.

In September 2015 tech website Re/code published an article announcing that Twitter was planning a new product that would allow users to post tweets that are longer than the platform’s established 140-characters.

Since then, news sources have run with the idea that Twitter is planning to change the character count limit to 10,000 characters, an exponential increase that would dramatically change the social network’s landscape of brevity-conscious updates.

Twitter’s HQ has been largely quiet in discussing public speculation, however on the 5th of January, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey posted the following:

Nat is compellingly unpersuasive in his writing unless he's been fed, in which case he turns into a walking literature academic. Which he was. A keen observer of online culture, you'll find him making odd statements about the existential malaise that memes signify.